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About LinkBacksBasically I need a new graphics card and a new power supply to run it. I have a limited budget of £170. Does anyone know any good combos that doesn't go over my budget?
New PSU & GPU
Basically I need a new graphics card and a new power supply to run it. I have a limited budget of £170. Does anyone know any good combos that doesn't go over my budget?
What about an nVidia GeForce 8800 GS (£109) and a 450W Corsair VX (£44)?
I would get a corsair 520w HX whisper at around £60 and the ATi HD 3850pro 512mb currently around £105 here in the supersavers section. Few more quid would get some sort of Sapphire or Asus solution.
If you want to save a bit on the PSU then the corsair VX 450w is pretty good. Silent, non modular though.
The 520w will be good enough for any system you could throw at it for a good while. Including dual GPU solutions.
I favour the HX over the VX, but the VX is still a good choice. The 8800GS is good value too, and should compete well against a HD 3850 Pro.
Not read much about the 8800GS yet. The theory of it was great (pick up where the old GTS left a hole) but whether it fills those shoes i don't know.
Considering how the 3850pro overclocks and even in standard tune it's a very worthy card at 1680 x 1050 or less.
Well, both combos come to the same price.
Point taken, I've not been following GFX card overclockability into account. In my experience, GFX cards are less consistent in terms of overclocks than CPU and also more troublesome to check: can't really just run Orthos for a few days to see if the system returns and error, actually need stare at screens for artefacts - hence I don't bother these days.
Driverheavens did a comparison of the GS against the 256MB Pro. It's a shame they did not through the 512MB Pro into the mix, but RAM generally just allows the card to perform better at higher settings/resolution. It's not the fairest of the the comparison though, as they were tested a factory overclocked model (to their credit, they did overclock both cards to their limit, and the GS still came on top).
But I don't think I'd be far off to say that the GS would remain at least competitive with the 3850 512MB performance wise (though if both card is only 'on par' then I would probably go for the 3850 because it would fit better in a 'media centre' PC if I choose to build one in the future).
Last edited by TooNice; 13-02-2008 at 08:40 PM.
I've just noticed that on my current PSU at says "Form Factor: µATX". Does this mean I can only replace it with a different µATX PSU?
What case do you have?
I'm not sure
The model is a Medion MD 8824 if that helps
No it doesn't as I can't find any specifications for it anywhere or even a picture for that matter...Originally Posted by DamonHignett
If you can take some photos and post them (or links to them) here and maybe people can take some educated guesses, the alternative is measure the physical size of the PSU you currently have if its 90x150x150 mm ish then its ATX if its significantly smaller on any axis then you will need to look to see if the is space for a PSU of those approx. dimensions in the case.
its 70x140x140 (approx)
Yeah that sounds like a uATX PSU unfortunetely
Just checked back at scan and actually the PSUs in the section for uATX PSUs which are more than 300W are actually fanless rather than uATX. The only uATX PSU on scan thats more than 300W is the 400W Colours IT unit and since it only costs £20 I can't see it being of suitable quality for running a powerful graphics card.
My advice would have to be a new case and PSU combination but I don't know if any of the other components in the system are non-standard if they are that may not be an option. You can buy graphics card PSUs (seperate units for just powerng the graphics card) like this Computer hardware and software at amazing prices, available online from Scan Computers UK
That graphics card PSU looks quite good, I might get that actually but where does it go? It would also save me hassle of cables
Its designed to fit in a 5.25" drive bay same as a cd/dvd rom drive. I have no idea as to how good the PSU is, so you would need to look up some reviews on it.
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